WHEN Rin Tin Tin died in 1932, Americans grieved and the world wrung its hands. Every national newspaper ran an obituary. One radio announcer mourned the passing of “a gentleman, a scholar, a hero, a cinema star”. He was a dog, to be sure, but he was also “virtually everything we could wish to be”.

But of course Rin Tin Tin never really died. The original pup gave up his doggy ghost, but this legendary hound lived on for decades in the body of sons, grandpups and distant relations, populating dreams and animating screens, big and small. Many staked their livelihoods on the pooch; some made a fortune and others lost everything. A woman in Oklahoma continues to breed Rin Tin Tin puppies for starry-eyed buyers. And the mere mention of his name—with its hint of a marching drum or a beating heart—can still evoke a childlike yearning, a craving for something just out of reach.

This is how Susan Orlean, a staff writer for the New Yorker who is best-known for “The Orchid Thief” (1998), came to devote nearly a decade of her life to writing this wonderful book. She stumbled on a reference to Rin Tin Tin and was startled by the strength of her reaction, “as though I had been waiting for decades just to be reminded of him again.” Ms Orlean was transported back to the 1950s, when “The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin” was on television and the “buzzing white noise” of her childhood always featured a boy shouting “Yo, Rinty!” Grappling with the death of her father and the birth of her son—with thoughts of mortality and memory, continuity and transience already in her mind—she found herself stirred by the emotional permanence of Rin Tin Tin, “that rare thing that endures when so much else rushes past.”

There is something uniquely noble, even contemplative, about the look of a German shepherd dog. Developed by a German officer in the late 19th century, the breed grew popular in America in the 1920s as soldiers returned from the front with stories of their loyalty and heroism in battle. Lee Duncan, a young American soldier stationed in France, could not believe his luck when he stumbled on a whimpering litter in an abandoned enemy kennel. An animal-lover with a lonely soul, he saved the puppies and kept the finest two for himself, Rin Tin Tin and Nanette (named after two wartime good-luck charms). Back in California, he sensed Rin Tin Tin was destined for greatness. It was less about money—Duncan lacked savvy and was hardly materialistic—than about devotion. He believed his dog was too glorious for a small stage.

Soon Rin Tin Tin was gracing the silent silver screen, earning his own handsome salary as well as the nickname “the mortgage lifter” for the way his films kept the Warner Bros studio afloat. When the Academy Awards were presented for the first time in 1929, Rin Tin Tin received the most votes for best actor; but the academy decided it would be a more auspicious precedent to grant the award to a human. This was just after Duncan's first wife divorced him. “All he cared for was Rin Tin Tin,” she told the Los Angeles Times.

Silent films were good for dogs. They could seem omniscient—“unknowable but accessible, driven but egoless”—against the pantomime and exaggeration of their human co-stars. Dogs were also beginning to enjoy a special place in the public's heart. As more Americans moved from the country to the city, pups evolved from farmhands to hearth-warmers who served as “a soft memento of another time”. The rise of talkies in the late 1920s meant the end of Rin Tin Tin's contract with Warner Bros, but like a cat this dog had many more lives to live.

Few writers can elevate a yarn about a Hollywood dog into a meditation on the durability of myth and the nature of heroism. Ms Orlean manages this, and also delivers a gripping tale about companionship, loss, war and show business, and the life's work of some endearingly nutty people. With this book, the story of Rin Tin Tin will more certainly live on.